Palestinian Agency Research Articles

Fuel Smuggling in the West Bank (2018–2021): Palestinian Economic Agency under the Israeli System of Spatial Control

This article critically re-examines the narrative that the Israeli system of spatial control has an exclusive negative impact on the West Bank economy. It focuses on the burgeoning fuel smuggling industry, which grew to constitute nearly one-third of the total consumed fuel in the West Bank by 2018. The article posits that the impacts of Israeli control on West Bank-Israeli economic relations involve an interplay between structural top-down imposition and Palestinian agency exerted from below. Drawing from documentary evidence and semi-structured interviews conducted with smugglers, Israeli, and Palestinian policymakers, the research reveals a paradox, finding its theoretical explanation in borderland studies. The barriers and fragmentation meant to oppress Palestinians create opportunities for new Palestinian economic beneficiaries. The article traces the emergence of smuggling networks that expand Palestinian-Israeli connections and cooperation. It concludes considering how the structure-agency interplay, which characterizes the Israeli colonial structure, affects the study of Palestinian political economy under Israeli occupation. This includes the influence of smuggling on supply, demand, pricing, and power hierarchies within the West Bank’s fuel sector.

Circumventing Israeli Control: Palestinian Furniture Exports via Israeli Settlements

Abstract West Bank exports to Israel have faced significant challenges due to the Israeli system of spatial control, aimed at controlling Palestinians and facilitating settler expansion throughout the West Bank. The routing of Palestinian commercial freight through the separation barrier has escalated logistics costs, while settlement expansion in Area C has further impeded mobility between Palestinian self-rule areas. This article highlights the tactics employed by Palestinian economic actors to offset these challenges within the confines of intensified Israeli spatial control. Using data from observations, interviews, and documentary sources spanning 2019–2023, the study focuses on Palestinian furniture exports to Israel. It reveals that Palestinians have leveraged colonial spatial variations to their advantage by forming partnerships with Israelis to export products through Jewish settlements. The article concludes by advocating a disaggregated level of analysis that uncovers the dynamic interplay between Israeli spatial constraints and Palestinian agency in response. In the case of furniture exporters, this has led to deepening Palestinian–Israeli economic ties and increased engagement with the infrastructure of Israeli occupation to mitigate its economic impact.

Putting Palestinian Agency First

Abstract While some political science scholarship and commentary on Palestinian politics engages Palestinian society as a topic of empirical scrutiny and theoretical significance, much of it either ignores society-level actors and dynamics or regards them as superfluous. Accordingly, society factors into the political story to the degree that it absorbs Israeli policies, is manipulated by self-interested factions, or is pushed to extremism by repression or religious radicalism. This special issue pushes against these trends. This introduction begins with an illustration of the problem, using the example of protest and how, for a century, many commentaries dismiss the societal groundings of mobilization. The essay then reviews a broad interdisciplinary scholarship that offers an alternative approach and the new contribution made by each of the five research articles in this issue. As a collection, these cutting-edge works put Palestinian society front and center as the driver of the Palestinian national movement, the anchor of Palestinian politics, and a key to the Arab-Israeli conflict without which no resolution is possible.

Rifts, Ruptures, and Fractures: The (Ir)relevance of Postmodern Conceptual Frames from the Point of View of Palestine's Poet Mahmoud Darwish

This article responds to the relative neglect of reading Mahmoud Darwish from a postmodern perspective. Inspired by postmodern theory, we suggest that Darwish after Oslo agreements in 1993 seeks to have a displaced and dialectical encounter with the collective identity; he utilizes a transition from being into becoming, from filiation into affiliation, knowing that this transition mirrors rifts, ruptures, and fractures in the Palestinian historical and geopolitical conditions in the post-Oslo era. By looking at poems written after the Oslo Accords, which were described by Bashir Abu-Manneh as “the root cause of the disintegration and liquidation of Palestinian agency,” we argue that Darwish's persona manifests the postmodern intellectual who is tempted to leave the collective and expatriate himself to hone an independent self and thought that provides a fresh perspective and a new understanding of Palestinian collectivity. While Darwish's pre-Oslo poetry expressed a collective voice, identification, and commitment to the national narrative, after Oslo, he gets more personal and, perhaps, detached from and critical of the nationalist political entities and narratives. Building on theoretical insights from both postcolonial and postmodern intellectuals, we also articulate ways in which the dialectical relation between postcolonialism and postmodernism appears in Darwish's poetry. We find that the persona at times combines, and at other times, fluctuates between, singularity and multiplicity, certainty and suspicion, the collective and the personal, place and space, tradition and innovation, while seeking revision, transition, contingency, dynamism, fluidity in the contemporary, post-Oslo time.

Reading Palestinian agency in mandate history: the narrative of the Buraq Revolt as anti-relational

ABSTRACTPosited as ‘post-national’ and articulated as ‘relational,’ recent historiography of the mandate period has had a long-term effect on how we read (and have been warned not to read) nationalism and resistance in Palestine. Beyond a critical survey of a select part of this recent historical literature, this essay shows how the question of nationalism has been framed in only one way and towards one end. Using this critical reading of the historical literature, this essay further attempts to open up space for a means of understanding Indigenous nationalism (and indigenous resistance) outside of the confined space of this particular treatment of nation-state nationalism. I suggest we move towards exploring an indigenous epistemological understanding of ‘history as story telling’ outside of these Zionist ontological constraints.

Critical discourse analysis of war reporting in the international press: the case of the Gaza war of 2008\u20132009

This paper employs critical discourse analysis (CDA) to analyse the representation of political social actors in media coverage of the Gaza war of 2008–2009. The paper examines texts of systematically chosen news stories from four international newspapers: ‘The Guardian, The Times London, The New York Times and The Washington Post’. The findings show substantial similarities in representation patterns among the four newspapers. More specifically, the selected newspapers foreground Israeli agency in achieving a ceasefire, whereby Israeli actors are predominantly assigned activated roles. By contrast, the four newspapers foreground Palestinian agency in refusing ceasefire through assigning activated roles. The findings of this study suggest that news reports on the Gaza war of 2008–2009 are influenced by the political orientations of the newspapers and also their liberal and conservative ideological stances. Overall, the most represented actors are Israeli governmental officials, whereas Palestinian actors are Hamas members. This representation draws an overall image that the war is being directed against Hamas.

The Presence of Palestinian Absence in Narrating the Zionist Nation into Being

In 2005, the 38th year of the Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem and the year that saw the construction of an eight metre high concrete Wall of Separation through the Occupied West Bank, an exhibition, 'The New Hebrews: A Century of Israeli Art', was held at Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin. The exhibition can be read as the narration of the Zionist nation coming into being – a narration in which the Palestinian people do not figure, though the reconfiguration of the land does. Only in the room on Conflict are Palestinian refugees, the Occupation and the Wall represented by Israeli photographers and media artists, making a slight dent into a historiography and landscape devoid of Palestinian agency and presence. From a Jewish feminist engagement with the discourses on Palestinian Right of Return, the essay addresses a set of questions about the field of vision posed by Ariella Azoulay in Death’s Showcase: The Power of Image in Contemporary Democracy (2001) when she asks: Who sees? Who is capable of seeing, what, and from where? Who is authorised to look? How is this authorization given or acquired? In whose name does one look? What can be seen outside the narrative of redemption and the frame set by the Temple Scroll and the Jug of Tears? Are the photographs of the Intifada and the portraits from the refugee camps in effect inserting the presence of the spectral other, as described by Judith Butler? This essay will consider the ways in which we might read these Israeli photographic insertions in the circumstance where representation and representational space is such a contested feature of the conflict.